The harmless observations of Ugandan, Paul Busharizi. Is it me or are we missing something here?

Monday, February 22, 2016

IT’S THE DAY AFTER AND … WHAT? NO CHAOS?

It’s a day after the elections.

If you are reading this paper then it is true Uganda has not
imploded on itself like the prophet of doom’s apocalyptic script should have
run. The elections went peacefully. There were some incidents here and there
but no widespread breakdown in law and order.

I imagine the results are coming in fast and thick from
every corner of the country and I imagine we are all holding our collective
breaths especially early in the morning as it is not yet clear which side the
pendulum will swing.

So yes, we may not be out of the woods yet.

But at what point would we be sure that the threat of chaos
will go away?

If the naysayers were to be believed the police crime
preventers were going to be scouring the country disrupting opposition
campaigns.

If the naysayers were to be believed some candidates would
be arrested and hampered from mobilising the people. Well on that count they
were right. On the last day of the three month campaign perennial campaigner
Kizza Besigye was detained and released without charge after a fracas at edge
of the city center.

If the naysayers were to be believed by now the country
would be enveloped in a cloud of terror we would be crawling around for fear of
raising our heads and having it loped off by some crazed vigilante.

The only terror I felt was the fear of turning the corner
and come face to face with the hordes of one opposition’s candidates
supporters. I even had a mental checklist to do in that event – roll windows
up, turn off ignition and hide key in under tongue!

"The problems of Uganda are real and any attempts to gloss
over them should be treated with the contempt they deserve...

The issues of income and wealth inequality, poor service
delivery and bureaucratic impediments to strategic thinking or execution of
forward looking plans are holding back the country from rising to its full
potential.

However it can be argued too that the leaps in progress
registered in the 1990s maybe hard to come by now, as the base of which we are
working is much larger.

In 1986 we had a GDP of $4b today the economy is about seven
times larger. It is easier to get a 10 percent or $400m growth from $4b economy
than it is to squeeze $2.8b improvement from today’s economy.

However in an ideal situation – world economy ticking along,
commodity prices behaving themselves and an enabling government bureaucracy,
compounding should have kicked in more strongly ensuring an exponential lift
off at some point in the last decade or so.

The figures show of course that our economy’s progress over
the last quarter century has outstripped many contemporaries on this continent
or Asia, we have worked out what it takes to achieve economic growth.

The trick now is how do you spread that growth more
equitably among the population?

Because the truth is while the economy has grown
spectacularly since 1986 our population is not seating still having more than
doubled from the 15.8 million it was 30 years ago.

"It can’t be emphasised enough that growth has to continue –
in the 1990s the World Bank calculated that the economy needed to grow by at
least seven percent to half our poverty figures, but more importantly that
growth has to be seen by everybody in the way of improved services and an
economy which allows for increased opportunities for advancement...

Instability and insecurity would only throw a spanner into
those plans.

But for now in the words immortalised by former Kenyan
President Mwai Kibaki, “Kazi iendelee!” (Let work continue)